I mean, honestly, why should I even care what I put in my body anymore?

Okay. Deep breaths. Focus. This isn’t about that other thing. This is about Christmas infringing so far on the rest of the calendar that I bought a box of limited edition festive Swiss Cake Rolls a week before Halloween.

Or…maybe I don’t want it to be about that, either.

Where was I? Right. As much as it might surprise people, I’m not eating horrible junk food every moment of every day. Since I fancy myself a rather good cook, I tend to be full by the time dessert rolls around. Combined with my habit of grabbing limited edition flavors the moment I see them, it often leads to a cupboard full of garbage that I ignore for weeks or months on end. One day, I assume, they’ll name the disorder, which will at least make it easier to explain.

It was because of said filled cupboard and unsaid thing that happened that I recently turned to junk food as a way to handle the stress.

Eggnog Cake Rolls are the best kind of the worst sort of snack. Like eggnog ice cream and fried butter before it, it took two horrible things, shrugged and then mashed it together. Then, it looked at consumers and said, “I mean, nobody lives forever, right?”

So I had some. Four, actually. Because I wanted to feel something other than what I was feeling at the time, even if it was far worse.

Or, at least, that’s sort of how it happened.

In reality, common sense was putting up a good fight against eating it. “We just got your body to a good place,” it cautioned. “You don’t have to stop and rest after washing your hands. If you put this in you now, it’ll do damage that might take months or years to sort out. Don’t do this. We’ve come so far.”

Meanwhile, my self-destructive side just shook its head, interjecting a “wrong” or “not true” every so often as common sense was making its point. “Where did you hear this?” it wondered angrily at the end.

Another part of me was simply tired of things the way they were. And while it acknowledged that eating a box of snack cakes would probably destroy my body, it was tired of so much rational thinking. “Thinking out every decision just means fewer new experiences,” it argued. “Are some of them bad? Sure. Are some of them unhealthy? Absolutely. But there are so many fried foods you haven’t tried.”

Inevitably, in a move that shocked everyone, I ate Eggnog Cake Rolls until I was sick.

It wasn’t the best idea. But it was what my body decided on. Though, not entirely. Because while over half of my body decided not to make me throw up, there was some strange math involved that I still don’t fully understand. And well, next thing you know, I’m staring at a bunch of empty cellophane wrappers wondering how this all happened.

“I don’t know,” I reasoned. “I’m pretty sure no human being is supposed to eat so much of something with so many five-syllable ingredients in it.”

“It sounds like you’ve already decided you want to be sick from eating these snack cakes.”

“I don’t know. I feel like they’ve given me good reason to expect to throw up. Stuffing snack cakes with solid eggnog is objectively bad for you.”

To which the dissenting parts replied, “Look. Are you still going on about this? It’s been almost thirty seconds since you ate them. Whatever’s going to happen, you just need to calm down and work with your body to get this all sorted out.”

I brought up that my body had yet to forgive me for eating a salad with no dressing eight years ago. There was name-calling. I’ll spare you the ugly details.

I’m writing this before I know what the outcome of stuffing my face with enough processed food to kill a mid-sized cow might be. I don’t want to throw up. Nobody does. But I fear that’s the only possible outcome from a snack cake that does everything but say exactly that on its packaging.

I fear I sacrificed my health for the promise of something that would taste good for a small moment compared to the time I’m forced to deal with the consequences. And most of all, I fear that no matter how badly things go, there will still be parts of my body that refuse to learn why I can’t eat things like this, all the while still blaming that salad I ate years ago for why I don’t feel well.

I’m not sure what to do now. Because I can’t un-eat what’s already been eaten. And while I hold the small shred of moral victory in knowing that I, on the whole, didn’t want to eat that whole box of snack cakes, I will invariably still have to deal with the results.

They were good. And it’s hard to deny that some parts of my body will revel in that taste and pleasant fullness up to the very moment before I empty my guts into the toilet. But I doubt I’ll look back on it in four years and think it was a good decision.

Writer’s Note: In fact, this is all one big Writer’s Note. There’s no column here. (Though there is a link to the actual column below.) I just wanted to have this act as a splash page for it to make a few things clear.

On Wednesday, some things happened.

I won’t go into great detail about those things aside from saying they involved a certain election in a certain country where I happen to live. Though, I will note that the results left me devastated in a way I’m unfamiliar with. And despite my not-at-all-best efforts, those feelings of devastation trickled into my writing the following day.

When I looked back on what I wrote, I immediately put it aside and vowed it would never see the light of day. It was too political. It was too bitter. And while I still think it was very funny, I avoided posting it for the same reasons I avoided posting any articles directly relating to politics – that isn’t what I want this blog to be. In the same way that I’d hate a simulator that accurately portrayed just how crappy working and paying bills can be, I feel that people read comedy writing as a way to escape hardship, not be reminded of it.

I came back to it again and again before finally deciding that I should, in fact, post the article. And not just to keep my Monday, Wednesday and Friday posting schedule. This is bigger than that.

I’ve spent most of the past three days seeing people being very upset. And some being total assbags. But mostly very upset.

As I said in my very first column here, I’m a writer. I write things. It’s how I entertain. It’s how I share my views on the world. It’s how I relate to others. It’s even how I put my own fears and insecurities into manageable perspectives. And, when I can, it’s how I try to make others feel better. Even if it’s just giving them a tiny chuckle when they didn’t think they’d ever be able to laugh again.

In that same vein, I wanted to show people that I, too, am still broken. I wanted to show that grief is a process. And I feel the best way to do that was to show everyone myself at my most raw – my most emotional. Because even if I can’t make you feel better about any of this, the least I want to do is let you know that I have these feelings. You aren’t alone. And your feelings are okay, too. At least insofar as they relate to this topic and aren’t super-weird.

A Nerd in Edgewise

I'm just a regular nerd, husband and dad trying to make some sense of a crazy world. New random goodness on an equally random schedule. Real life obligations mean I can't commit to set days, but probably two to three times per week.

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